All posts tagged ‘Deer’

If there’s a segment that’s underrepresented in boardgaming, it has to be deer hunters. But thanks to Steve Jackson Games, that’s no longer the case. Trophy Buck, a new dice game from the publishing company, allows you to get buck fever from the safety of your own living room.

The game bears more than a passing similarity to the very popular Zombie Dice, also from Steve Jackson. The game consists of a camouflaged bag and 12 camo’d-out dice with a variety of faces. Deer icons represent a startled deer, tracks stand for a deer that may have caught a scent but is still around, and certain faces include antlers with various points for varying sizes of racks. The dice are also color coded, including a multitude of brown dice, which have 2 point racks for the buck fawns just developing velvet, and a couple of other color and point combinations culminating in one orange die, which has a 8-point trophy rack on a single side of the die.

As in Zombie Dice, players attempt to reach a point score first: in this case, thirty-six. Draw three dice at random and roll them at the same time. Points are saved, tracks are re-rolled and startles are set aside. Get three startles, your point total for the round is wiped out and your turn is over. Stop hunting and save points anytime before that and your score is banked towards a winning total.

The game is fun and fast-moving, like Zombie Dice, but, for me, Trophy Buck lacks the light-hearted fun of Zombie Dice. I liked the variation of different dice providing different values; still, it’s difficult to copy the role playing fun we have with Zombie Dice. (How would you role play deer anyway?) However, if you’re headed out hunting or camping, or just enjoy dice games, check out Trophy Buck.

Trophy Buckretails for $9.95 and should be available at your friendly local game store or hunting outfitter.

What a week here at GeekDad! Did you happen to notice the theme? GeekDad went “UnWired” most of the week, focusing on the outdoors and other summer activities to participate in now that the school year is just about upon us. With that being said and the volume of posts this past week, let’s get started with the GeekDad week in review.

Post of the Week

GeekMom Jenny Williams hit UnWired week strong with not one, not five, not ten but 30 classic games for simple outdoor play. I think we were all hit with a strong dose of nostalgia as we drifted off in memory back to the days of our youth and the games we would play. That’s why this is our post of the week!

Sometimes a learning opportunity comes about when you’re least expecting it to. Sometimes a moment of beauty takes a mundane experience into transcendence. And sometimes you get truly lucky and get both at the same time. Such was the case just two weeks ago, when my wife and kids had a close encounter with a friendly deer while on vacation.

Photo: Elyssa Brecher

They had gone to Chincoteague Island, Virginia, with some friends of ours, to relax and spend a lot of time on the beach. My kids and one of the other kids have gotten very good at riding their bicycles, and so they were out riding around near the rental house, when a young male deer came to investigate the goings-on. Now, most deer in populated areas are understandably fairly skittish around humans, but not this one. He came right up to the kids, who had of course stopped to look at him.

The deer, who (they found out days later) had been named “Charlie” by some of the locals (who also put a flea collar on him), let the kids and grownups pet him, and ate some bits of fruit out of their hands. Then Charlie started to trot away, and the kids started riding their bikes back and forth in the neighborhood. Charlie spotted them doing this, and must have decided it looked like fun, because he returned and started running along behind them. He came back up to the house, and even tried to get into my wife’s minivan (the hatchback was open to get something out of it).

Photo: Elyssa Brecher

My wife and our friends seized on this pretty amazing event as an opportunity to teach the kids about deer and their habits. They already knew some, of course, but their interest was piqued for obvious reasons. We’d thought trips to the zoo were good for getting the kids interested in learning more about animals, but there’s really nothing like a really close encounter with wildlife to make them want to know more. Of course, not all wildlife is as friendly as Charlie the deer.

My only regret is that I wasn’t actually there to witness it, though it was great watching my kids’ faces light up as they told me all the details of what had happened (I arrived in Chincoteague later that same day). I don’t know if I’ve adequately described just how strange and wonderful an experience it was. Let me say this: I can almost picture my kids, when they’re my age, telling my grandchildren about that time on Chincoteague they rode their bikes with a deer.

I’ve uploaded a few other pictures to a public Flickr set, which also contains larger versions of the pictures you see here.